Rally the Troops
by Rellik 01011993
Summary: Will is in trouble, and Hannibal never expected the team to be so complacent to such trouble. He never expected he would need to rally the troops when it came to rescuing Will. One-shot. Reviews always welcome.


Hannibal stared at Jack and the rest of his team. The team that Will had been working with, despite his better judgement for his own sanity. The leader who had promised Will would not get too close. The leader who had promised to be there to stop him going over the edge. The leader who had lied, and the team who had failed Will.

The team who now failed to listen to Will as they had listened to him in the past. They had given up on him. They had no faith in him. It disgusted Hannibal, yet it worked well into his plan. This would help when the time came.

"How many times has Will made jumps to conclusions that none of us could follow? Stated things as fact, that to us seemed to be random guesses, only to be proven right again and again? You've followed crazier hunches of his merely because they left his lips while he was in the mind of madmen. Now he's doing it again, sitting inside someone else's madness, trying to save himself and yet none of you will listen to him." He scoffed at them, turning away from the sad faces of the team before he did something stupid.

"Dr Lector, all of the evidence points to Will. And he won't even fully deny that he did it, nor will he tell us where he actually was." Jack spoke angrily.

Hannibal grit his teeth before he turned back around. "Given that someone may be framing young Will, don't you think it logical that all evidence points to him? And what do you expect him to do, lie about where he was? If he does not know, he will not lie. If it _was_ him that did these things, he will accept punishment accordingly. Because he is a _good_ man, he would want himself locked away if it was indeed him who did this. But it wasn't."

He started to pace Jack's office angrily, needing to get his frustration out in some way before he got it out in his usual way. These people had claimed to be Will's friends, his pseudo family, and yet now they had abandoned him at the slightest hint that Will was darker than their minds could fathom. That he was as dark as the things they had pushed him into for so long.

Hannibal needed to frame Will now so he wouldn't be the source of speculation later, but he had hoped that the young man's family would stand behind him more firmly. Having to rouse the team to actually investigate Will's advice had not been a part of his plan. If they let him rot on death row, Hannibal would…consider that to be quite rude.

He turned back to glare at Jack. "You promised he would not get too close. Promised that should I advise it, you would pull him back in from the field. You failed to do both, Agent Crawford. He has told you more than enough details for you to start investigating his idea that he is being framed. If he told you that another suspect was being framed, you would look into it, would you not?"

Katz, amazingly, was the first to respond. Hannibal had thought that Alana would be biting at the bit to prove Will's innocence. Perhaps her views of him being unstable, which she had been insensitive enough to tell Will to his face whilst turning him down, were blurring her vision.

"Yeah! We can't just dump him on death row. We need to fight for him. He's always been a little weird, but that's Will. The things he can empathise with freak him out more than anything. I don't think he could actually do it himself… Do you, Dr Lector?" she paused uncertainly.

Hannibal smiled kindly at Katz, impressed with her assessment of her friend. "No, Ms Katz, I do not think that Will could do these things. At least, not while he is Will. At the very least, we will prove he was not of his own mind, at best we will prove his frame-up."

Katz smiled, as a child would smile when a favourite teacher praised their work. She seemed pleased that Hannibal approved of her assessment. He found that strange for a moment – Katz had never had much to do with him, nor had she seemed overly impressed with him. Then he realised, she was impressed with Will, and Will was impressed with Hannibal. She looked up to him now because Will did. She respected Will's judgement even now, though it may only be subconsciously, it was still a good sign.

"Will, once this is over; I would strongly suggest that you reconsider your friend-base…" Hannibal spoke softly, not entirely certain how Will was going to take the news he felt obligated to give him. To his surprise he received a sarcastic smirk in response.

"What, you're concerned because they weren't all prancing around with protest signs stating that I'm innocent? I get inside psychopaths' heads for a living, Hannibal, and on top of that I'm unstable and my mind scares even me. I'm surprised they put off arresting me for as long as they did, to be quite honest with you." Will spoke calmly, his eyes not meeting Hannibal's, but that was nothing strange. On a normal topic a person would be lucky to receive fleeting glances of eye contact from the young profiler, given the uncomfortable nature of _this_ particular topic, Hannibal was not worried by Will's sudden interest in the wall.

Hannibal stared a moment, trying to decide why Will accepted this treatment. "How can you accept such treatment from people you consider to be your friends Will? I had to argue with them for half an hour just to get them to do what they normally do in such cases."

Will's self-mocking smile was back, and Hannibal began to understand. "Hannibal, do you suppose I have better relationships in the past to judge these current relationships against? Something to give me a higher expectation of friendship?" he paused for a moment, trying to choose his words. "They've seen me climb in and out of the minds of every breed of psychopath we've come across. They've heard me talk about victims out loud the way the killers think about them. They see me flinch away from eye contact and socialising, yet I'll walk into a murder scene and stand calmly for as long as I need."

He paused again, taking a deep breath. He didn't want to tell Hannibal what he was about to tell him, but he had to. The doctor was judging his friends too harshly. He had to show him perspective. "Back home people used to cross the street to avoid me because I was weird. Tried to get me arrested because I knew things I shouldn't know. All over unimportant things like knowing who was going to quit their job and who was having an affair. They never saw me crawl into the mind of a murderer and speak his thoughts. They never saw me clawing my way back to myself from the darkness. And they hated me already."

Hannibal sighed, sad for his friend. The young man had such compassion and empathy for the rest of the world, but they refused to show him even the mildest return of courtesy. "It makes me sad, good William, that you have such low expectations for yourself. Do you truly see yourself as the world does, or do you hold higher respect for yourself?"

Will chuckled, self loathing rising again. "I see myself more clearly than the world, Doctor Lector, and so I hate myself more thoroughly than they ever could. They may see the disturbing process of my work from the outside, but trust me Hannibal, it is far worse from inside my mind."


End file.
